Kaspersky shares cyberthreat landscape insights for the African region.

Kaspersky, yesterday, shared cyberthreat landscape data for Africa, stating that as the cybersecurity landscape advances, cyber threats become more diversified and complex.

According to the company, this trend is especially visible due to the emergence of AI and the escalating geopolitical and economic turbulence within the Middle East.

In the African region, Kaspersky’s telemetry showed phishing attacks, which use social engineering tactics to scam people into revealing sensitive information, rose by 29%.

However, the number of overall cyberthreats in South Africa decreased by 29% in 2023, as compared to 2022.

Over the same period, Kenya experienced an increase in ransomware attacks by 68%, the use of backdoors by 47%, and phishing by 19%, while overall threats grew by 8%.

Nigeria saw an overall decrease in threats by 10%, while banking malware attacks, designed to collect online banking credentials and other sensitive information from infected machines, increased by 8%.

Kaspersky experts highlighted AI, which is influencing the scale of modern threats, alongside threats targeting industrial control systems within critical infrastructure.

According to Kaspersky's analysis, online threats caused by vulnerabilities on web pages, in emails or web services, have fluctuated significantly in the Middle East, Türkiye and Africa (META) region.

Türkiye saw the highest number of users affected by online threats (41.8%), followed by Kenya (39.2%), Qatar (38.8%) and South Africa (35%). Fewer users were affected in Oman (23.4%) and Egypt (27.4%) followed by Saudi Arabia (29.9%) and Kuwait (30.8%).

“As the cybersecurity landscape evolves, cyber threats continue to become diverse and sophisticated. This trend is particularly evident due to the emergence of advanced technologies like AI and the escalating geopolitical and economic turbulence within the META region,” says Amin Hasbini, director of META Research Center, Global Research and Analysis, Kaspersky.